In her most recent work, Susannah Cornwall addresses un/familiar theological questions pertaining to the social and church institutions of marriage, procreation, and family. She deftly explores the familiarities/continuities (e.g., heterosexual marriage) and unfamiliarities/discontinuities (e.g., same-sex marriage) of these institutions in both Christian history and the contemporary, primarily Western, social context. In particular, she examines the teachings and theologies of the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England, in dialogue with a spectrum of contemporary theories (e.g., queer theories) and practices (e.g., polyamory), and hopes to initiate a more sweeping theological dialogue.
Cornwall provides a succinct interrogation of her key notions over eight chapters: generativity (in relation to biological procreativity), marriage (in light of its shifting place and practice in the Christian tradition and emerging relational models, like nonmarital parenting), natality (as articulated by Grace Jantzen and Hannah Arendt: the universal reality of reproduction and birth as a basis for community and kinship), adoption (a normative and queer generative option, alongside biological reproduction), the meanings of procreation (particularly within a pronatalist community), and the integration of her explorations in light of repetition and difference (recognition of and unfamiliarity with both historical and current marital and generative options). Her walk along this ambiguous line grounds both her thinking throughout and the conclusions she draws.
Cornwall's work is wide-ranging and helpful. For instance, she critically engages Robert Song's suggestion of “covenant partnerships” (rather than marriages) as vocational callings for nonprocreative unions, notably, same-sex unions. Recognizing the variety of nonprocreative marriages in Christian history, however, Cornwall finds the distinction spurious and rather more prescriptive than descriptive of the kinds of unions people are called to fulfill (29–38). She also explores the experiential and philosophical complexities of Quiverfull (123–50), the pronatalist and proadoption American Christian movement, as completely open to procreation but pocketed within a narrow, tribal sense of recreating a community of “warriors” to perpetuate Christian civilization in clear continuity with the past (134). This, she notes, constitutes a denial of the natal specificity of individuals (i.e., difference), in service to a controlled communal future based upon an idealized past (i.e., sameness). This perception ultimately falls short of the un/familiar theology she espouses.
This book is a welcome entry into contemporary theological engagement with the contested institutions of marriage and family. Her pivotal distinction between biological procreation and generativity more broadly conceived (19–42) enables Cornwall specifically to include previously excluded models of relationship and creativity within Christian institutions, a task with which many theologians struggle today. Ultimately, she is open to the possibility of multiform relationships and families that are both continuous with the values of Christian history (e.g., adoption into Christ's family, human creativity) and discontinuous with the traditional expressions of those values (e.g., heterosexual marriage, biological reproduction), including nonprocreative generativity, and same-sex marriage and parenting (175–82).
Key for Cornwall is her accurate conviction that, contrary to some current Roman Catholic and Church of England teachings and theologies, marriage, family, parenting, and reproduction change over time. She investigates ways “to understand these changes not as a raging tide to be turned back, but as in continuity with goods deeply embedded in the collection of theologies concerned with the Christian faith” (1). In this light, Cornwall identifies the failure of Western Christian churches to recognize their own marginal status in postmodern culture, that is, their failure to see themselves as existing historically in a dynamic world. Authoritatively proclaiming divine truths about human relationships, without concomitantly listening, leaves the churches struggling to engage meaningfully with contemporary empirical realities regarding sex, gender, relationships, and families. In contrast, Cornwall herself exemplifies the shift toward historical consciousness and its capacity to ally the marginalized church with, rather than alienate it from, other marginal groups (e.g., LGBTQ+ communities) (154–59).
Cornwall's work will likely have detractors, given her stated openness to rethinking long-standing closed relational institutions. Regardless, her book constitutes a cogent and necessary contribution to a difficult discussion, best suited to late undergraduate and graduate students, and a welcome addition to theological libraries.
